My copy of What To Expect the First Year, Chapter Four, "The First Month", reads: "By the end of this month, your baby may possibly be able to vocalize in ways other than crying (e.g.: cooing)."

I wonder if "cooing" means "releasing the sort of squawk you could easily imagine emanating from the lush tropical forests of the Jurassic Period, signaling the approach of a ravenous Pterodactyl"? Or "grunting as though passing a bowel movement the size of Rhode Island"?

I was driving my car with Riley in the backseat this weekend when he started with some, well, vocalizing - specifically, a series of escalating moans that I was desperately hoping would not erupt into a full-fledged crying fit, so in an attempt to entertain him I turned on the stereo and played the CD that was in the player, a mix that included that time-honored goth classic, "Bela Lugosi's Dead". I'm not sure I would have guessed Bauhaus would compete lullaby-wise to, say, "You Are My Sunshine", but I can now personally give 80's era art-rock a big thumbs up in terms of immediate results. Perhaps it was the soothing lyrics that sent him off to slumberland:

Listening to its catchy refrain (Undead undead undead!), I was remembering my own white-makeup days back in 1990 or so, and it occurred to me to wonder how in the hell we managed to dance to this song. It was a definite crowd pleaser at the Depressed Teen Nightclub we went to; everyone lurked out onto the dance floor and did...something during the nine long minutes of Bela Lugosi continuing to be, you know, dead and all, but really - it's not an upbeat song (duh), and it doesn't have what you might call a good beat that you can dance to. It seems to me that people essentially ended up doing some kind of very somber Standing In Place And Swaying thing that involved lots of floaty arms clad in black lace, hands clasped to corseted torsos, and swirling velvet skirts. I'm not sure what the girls did.

HA HA HA! Oh, just a little goth humor there.

While I can't remember what sort of moves I personally may have busted (perhaps a variation on the standing-and-swaying thing: the octopus trailing arms, performed primarily for the tracer effect), I can remember exactly what my boyfriend at the time did whenever one of his favorite songs came on. He went out on the floor and launched into this elaborate routine where he very seriously and dramatically enacted some bizarre scene that existed solely in his Manic Panic-dyed head. He'd lunge at the floor and raise the lid of an invisible box, rolling his eyes skyward at the contents therein; he'd pluck what was apparently supposed to be a sword from its depths and wave it about while striding purposefully around the room.

This sort of behavior would certainly cause me some measure of alarm if I were to observe it today, being as how interacting with objects that no one else can see is typically reserved for religious visionaries, raving lunatics, and worst of all: mimes. However, at the time my boyfriend was thought of as, I shit you not, a "really cool dancer".

Need I even mention we were all, in the immortal words of Bill Hicks, reeeeeeaaaal fucking high on drugs?

Anyway, it was a funny moment of tripping down memory lane, triggered by Bela & Co. How different things are today - my foundation is "natural beige" for starters, not "bloodless pallor"; I have more than one pink outfit currently hanging in my closet; I married a man who actually owns a chainsaw to cut apart trees, not as an homage to Tobe Hooper. But lo: the undercurrent link! The same song playing, only instead of accompanying my theater-club boyfriend's, uh, artistic expression, it's lulling my infant son to sleep. Undead undead undead!

Now, I must go - the child, he is "cooing". As long as we're calling "screeching like a small but highly pissed-off howler monkey" cooing, that is.